Minecraft: Pocket Edition leads iPhone Games of the Week

PC indie sensation Minecraft makes its way to the iPhone and iPad with Minecraft: Pocket Edition this week. The game focuses on the massive amount of building players have been doing in the game, and it’s a great way to let your creativity run wild, even if you’re not at your computer. It leads this […]

PC indie sensation Minecraft makes its way to the iPhone and iPad with Minecraft: Pocket Edition this week. The game focuses on the massive amount of building players have been doing in the game, and it’s a great way to let your creativity run wild, even if you’re not at your computer. It leads this week’s best titles in the App Store, but there’s a lot of variety available, too. Check out the most fun games to hit the App Store this week below.

Minecraft: Pocket Edition (iPhone, iPad) $7.99

Just about everyone everywhere loves LEGO. There’s a reason the little square interconnecting blocks are so popular, and there are so many different sets in the world, they’re amazingly fun. Now, imagine playing with LEGO blocks in a virtual world. Everything is a potential resource you can build. The indie game that has already received a ton attention on PC (and it’s still in beta). With the release of Minecraft Pocket Edition on iOS, players can now bring the “build anything” attitude of the game wherever they go. It’s a little limited in comparison to the PC version, lacking animals or vicious, exploding “creepers” that can ruin everything by killing you, but if you’re an obsessive kind of person who loves to spend hours making scale models, Minecraft is a great investment.

Bullet Time HD (iPhone, iPad) Free

Great 3-D graphics set twin-stick shooter Bullet Time HD apart from the hundreds or thousands of similar titles in the App Store. But Bullet Time isn’t just another game about shooting people. It also packs some depth with role-playing elements that let you purchase different weapons and pieces of armor for your character to make him stronger. There are lots of different elements you can incorporate into your character to fight off mutants and various other enemies, but even better is the fact that you can take on Bullet Time with up to two friends in the game’s multiplayer mode. That’s a lot of ways to play, and a lot of content, in this free game.

RPM: Gymkhana Racing (iPhone, iPad) $2.99

Racer RPM: Gymkhana Race doesn’t pit you against any opponent except yourself and your own abilities. Every track in the top-down game is about how quickly you can navigate it and the score you can rack up in doing so. Primarily, you want to get your car going fast enough and handling well enough to drift around corners, performing cool stunts in order to nab points. Each track also has shortcuts to help you cut down your time and various side objectives for you to complete to earn new cars. There’s a lot of racing action on offer here, but with a slightly different take that makes RPM feel fresh.

Blueprint 3D (iPhone, iPad) $0.99

For some reason, Blueprint 3D is addictive, despite its exceedingly simple nature. Each puzzle in the game requires you only to rotate a 3-D image so that the lines floating in space align to make an image. It’s easy to learn and doesn’t require dexterity or skill, but Blueprint will keep you coming back with its interesting images and its scoring based on speed. The faster you analyze what you’re seeing and adjust it to form a 2-D image, the better your score. For just a buck, this easygoing puzzler has an interesting ability to keep you busy.

Jurassic Park: The Game 1 HD (iPad 2) $6.99

Though it’s limited to owners of the iPad 2 only, Telltale Games’ latest point-and-click adventure has the same thing going for it that its earlier Back to the Future: The Game did. It’s a new story based on a classic film. Jurassic Park: The Game brings you back to Isla Nublar with a mix of puzzle-solving adventure, and deadly dinosaurs. Fighting or avoiding the animals is done with quick-time events demanding you follow Simon Says-like commands with your finger in order to help the game’s characters avoid certain death. Add to that an interesting Jurassic Park story and you have a worthwhile game.

Phil Hornshaw is a freelance writer, editor and author living in Los Angeles, dividing his time between playing video games, playing video games on his cell phone, and writing about playing video games. He’s also the co-author of So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Time Travel, which attempts to mix time travel pop culture with some semblance of science, as well as tips on the appropriate means of riding dinosaurs. Check out his Google+ profile.